A Costly Mistake
Check out the latest addition to my “Stonewall Jackson Fanboy Collection”: A 1965 Topps trading card depicting the mortal wounding of Stonewall Jackson.
I’ll be honest, all these years into my Civil War career, and I had no idea this set of cards existed. They predate me in the world by seven years, so they’re before my time, but I can’t even recall seeing them in the collectors’ world. The series was called Civil War News because the back of each card looked like a newspaper page.
This is card 43, “Costly Mistake,” out of a full set of 88 cards. Each card has a great title like “Wall of Corpses” and “Blood Massacre” and “Flaming Death.”
Many of the cards are graphic in their depictions. Card 64, “Jaws of Death,” clearly shows a gray-clad infantryman getting bayonetted in the chest. Card 19, “Pushed to His Doom,” shows a Federal infantryman falling on a set of sharpened stakes at Winchester. Card 13, “Dying Effort,” features a Federal soldier in the foreground with a sword in his heart as he stabs a Confederate with his bayonet; behind him, another Federal blasts a Confederate off a horse at point-blank range. Some of the images are downright grisly—except for their bright colors and melodramatic tone.
The history told on these cards is sketchy at best, as a quick glance at “Costly Mistake” shows. Labeled “Chancellorsville—May 10, 1863,” it depicts Stonewall Jackson riding atop a white horse across an open field on a clear, starlit night. A single Confederate soldier shoots him.
Jackson died on May 10, yes, but he was of course shot on May 2, deep in the thick tangles of the Wilderness just to the west of the Chancellorsville intersection. He was riding his own Little Sorrel—whose color was in his name—not a Traveller-like white charger. The whole Confederate line erupted in gunfire. Heck, we could even nit-pick the kind of hat Jackson is wearing in the picture, which is not his infantryman’s kepi.
The history on the back is just as sketchy. In the tale, Jackson is returning to a restless Confederate camp and guards fire upon him. In response, Lee says, “I have lost my right arm and I know it can never be replaced.” And thanks to a misplaced apostrophe, Jackson was “responsible for some of the Confederate’s biggest victories of the war.” (Is that a reference to Lee? Should that have been “Confederacy’s”?)
Other cards tell equally dubious stories. As one example, the card depicting John Sedgwick’s death, card #62, “The General Dies,” dates Uncle John’s death to May 5 in the Wilderness. A bloody Sedgwick lies in a grassy field with burning woods behind him. Wrong AND awesome at the same time!
And that’s what makes this card set—and “Costly Mistake”—so fascinating. It’s almost as if the history is beside the point. The cards were produced in conjunction with the Civil War Centennial, aimed at young boys who were hungry for Civil War excitement. The card set, in all its melodramatic glory, delivers. (Card 73, “Through the Swamp,” even shows a Federal soldier bayonetting an alligator!)
My first reaction to “Costly Mistake” was not to nitpick the history but to chuckle at the title. Jackson’s mortal wounding a “costly mistake”—you think? There’s an understatement, I thought.
But I also thought, “I must have that card.” It’s not about the history at all. Rather, the young boy in me, eager for Civil War excitement, was gleeful at finally finding the one card he’d been trying to track down—even if I didn’t even know I was looking for it.
The “Mars Attacks!” of 1861! BTW, did you hide that Jackson print from your long suffering spouse?
Too bad about the inaccuracies, looks like a cool set.
Chris, in 1962 I was 8 years old and very sick with the mumps and the measles. My dad would often bring me a pack of these cards. Such a treasured memory. Time and my mother made them disappear, but the memories remain.
“Time and my mother made them disappear” — what a great line!
Dubious stories or not, these are extremely cool cards … was the bubble gum still good?
I only bought the single card, so I don’t know about the gum. But if it was anything like the gum from baseball cards when I was a kid, it’s probably indestructible.
Most likely another card in the Topps set, probably entitled “Inedible Rations,” claims that their trading card gum was issued to Civil War soldiers.
Hi Chris, enjoyed your excitement at finding the Topps Civil War card. If you were excited, just picture me at 10-years-old buying packs and packs and trading with friends to get a complete set which I have preserved in an album, not to mention all the crappy gum I had to chew. For a history of the Topps set, see David Carrino’s article in the archives of the Cleveland CWRT’s newsletter “The Charger.”
Hello Chris. I found your comments about Civil War News very interesting. I live in England and I collected these cards in, I think, 1964 published by a company called a&bc. The quality left a lot to be desired but that didn’t really matter to a boy of 10. In this country you also got some reproductions of Confederate bank notes with the cards. My mother disapproved for two reasons firstly they were a bit too graphic with too much blood and secondly the bubble gum which she told me would blow up in my tummy if I swallowed it! Despite all that I was the first person in my school to have the full set. This set I still have as well as a second set ( missing the checklist ). At the same time I started collecting toy soldiers with gray uniforms to go with ones with blue uniforms. This was the beginning of my endless fascination with the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln. I am very lucky to have a very patient wife who tolerates my ever growing book collection which is now more than a thousand titles which started with a book by Bruce Catton published in the UK by Penguin & published in your country by American Heritage. Please keep up all your good work, I look forward to opening my emails & finding something from you as well as the books that you publish. Thank you.
I collected these cards when I was an early teen. I managed to build a complete set that survives today. More than I can say for my sports cards from that same period!
The cards were a delight to be cherished. These and “Classics Illustrated.”
I purchased the entire set in the early 1970s at one of the first American Sports Card Collectors Association show/meetings in New York City. Got them super cheap back then and regretfully sold them around ten years later for a pittance. Many were quite gory and most historically inaccurate in one fashion or the other. The gore was a homage to a late 1930s set called Horrors of War, some of which were so bad that my father wasn’t allowed to see them when he was a kid. This Civil War set is a real treasure of the Centennial era. I wish I hadn’t lacked the foresight of their value when I was in my late teens.
These were very common in the UK in the early 1960s and stimulated my interest in the war, that has endured over 60 years. I know of many Brits who likewise are still armchair enthusiasts regarding the history, which all started from collecting these cards. I still have a set. Many are quite gratuitously gory and certainly wouldn’t be available to children these days, in the UK at least. The accuracy of the text was ok, they weren’t designed as academic tools, The places, dates and names were mostly accurate and introduced me to a lifetime of reading about the war. The card in question features Stonewall Jackson, accidentally shot by his own men at night at the Battle of Chancellorsville – that’s all pretty accurate and was probably more than my infant school teachers knew at the time. I posted a similar item on the Battle of Hatchers Run FB group and got comments from Brits recalling their childhoods. Shame there wasn’t a card depicting that battle! Pegram / Hetty or Sallie the dog would have made a suitable image.